Description

The performance strategies of 5-year-old children required to remember information embedded in a meaningful context was compared with that of children who were simply told to remember the information, or were not told their memory would be assessed. Recall was tested either immediately or after a one-hour delay. Children in the "embedded" groups employed mnemonic strategies more frequently and studied longer before judging learning to be complete than children in other groups, but only children tested immediately recalled more. One hypothesis for the poor retention of children in the "embedded delay" group was that they recognized the difficulty of remembering over an extended interval; this was tested in Study 2 where no mention was made of the retention interval over which children would have to remember. Under these conditions, the performance of the "embedded delay" and the "embedded immediate" groups was equivalent. Overall, children made more effort to learn if they were provided with an explicit purpose for learning.

Issue Date:

1985-12

Publisher:

Champaign, Ill. : University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Center for the Study of Reading.Cambridge, Mass. : Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.